Get tougher on illegal pot shops

Gov. Hochul brought a fly-swatter to a locust swarm Wednesday announcing that the state will tell Google and other online local business directories to stop listing illegal cannabis storefronts alongside legal ones. It’s a good idea as far as it goes: The 25 legal storefronts in the five boroughs are outnumbered by more than 100to-1 by black-market dealers.

And not just outnumbered, but outgunned — because the illegals have lower prices than the legit ones thanks to cheaper, untaxed pot, and ignore location restrictions like avoiding proximity to schools or day care centers or one another, and have alluring signage and marketing that the legals aren’t allowed.

We guess it’s a good thing that the illegals might stop appearing on Google Maps, but they’ll still be on block after block after block, as ubiquitous as coffee shops.

The big problem of New York’s cannabis legalization has been that nobody in the Legislature or in the weakling Office of Cannabis Management was willing to strictly enforce the rules to prevent vendors from setting up shop and profiting. Sure, there’ve been piddly fines here and vague threats to hold landlords accountable there, but none of those mechanisms has made a dent because there have been too few enforcers with sufficiently strong powers to keep the genie in the bong.

And there have been too few enforcers due to some combination of ineptitude and ideological resistance that any crackdown would be repeating the worst of the War on Drugs.

But padlocks aren’t handcuffs; tough civil enforcement is not tossing people in jail. It’s simply sending the message that unlicensed businesses cannot profit, just as they aren’t supposed to and generally don’t if they try to sell alcohol or cigarettes or insert almost any other product name here.

The epic enforcement fail has not been the sole problem with New York’s misbegotten legal cannabis rollout — lawsuits set the effort back further, and all of this would’ve been a hell of a lot simpler if the feds didn’t stupidly continue to classify cannabis as a dangerous and highly addictive Schedule I drug — but it’s been at the heart of why the legal shops have never had a puncher’s chance.

Hochul, like Mayor Adams, knows most of this — and is pushing in her budget to give localities more power to combat illegal shops, while bulking up the state’s authorities to boot. She’s also trying to lift the burden of a tax that’s an additional weight on licensees’ shoulders. But none of it is tough enough or happening quickly enough.

What might have been a manageable challenge in the early days is now like a spot of mold that’s grown to cover the ceiling and the walls.

Illegal pot shops don’t just saturate the city; they seem to be continuing to open at a breathtaking rate. How there’s sufficient commerce to support them stumps us, but that it’s all happening outside the law means that tax revenues are falling far short of projections. The revenue, intended to fund education, and community grants, and drug treatment and education, isn’t flowing — but the smoke is filling the city.

Call it a blow for freedom if you must, but it’s a loss for public health and public trust.